The current radio broadcast industry depends primarily upon broadcast towers to transmit signals to radio receivers. According to FCC regulations, the frequency and amplitude of these broadcasts are strictly regulated such that different radio stations broadcast in different geographic regions, and the number of stations per region is governed through FCC licenses. Although radio broadcasts can, at times, effectively transmit content to large audiences in a geographic region, and such a system may be accessed with ubiquitous devices and without incurring user subscription fees, such a system has various problems.
For example, the broadcasts are bound to moderately sized geographic regions, and the number of independent broadcasts is restricted by the licensed frequency spectrum. Thus, for AM and FM radio broadcasts, a traveler outside a given region cannot listen to broadcasts from that region (e.g., someone in New York City cannot listen in real time to a Los Angeles FM broadcast, except for syndicated programs).
In addition, the number of independent stations in a given region is restricted to a relatively small number as current RF technology and licensed spectrum do not permit thousands of AM/FM radio stations per region. Moreover, the cost of broadcast to a region large enough to attract substantial advertising revenue is high, so that small specialized radio stations are often not able to attract sufficient revenues to invest in larger area broadcasts, and the larger radio stations often have to broadcast programs that have wide appeal.
Radio stations recently have also used a packet-switched network such as the Internet to broadcast programs via a multicast or unicast. These programs may be archived and presented on-demand or may be real-time continuously present programs. At first, such programs were made available to users at a single server located at the source of the broadcast. However, this quickly led to server overload and, thus, a deterioration in the quality of the broadcast below acceptable levels and/or the inability of users to access the broadcast altogether. More recently, broadcasts have been made available to users at “the edge of the network” or, in other words, at servers local to the users. With the ever-increasing demands associated with handling larger volumes of data traffic, and the inherent difficulty in scaling multiple independent point-to-point streams, however, these servers have also been quick to reach overloaded conditions, with a resulting deterioration in service similar to that of source-based broadcasting/multicasting. Moreover, packet switching, with its inherently variable delays, is not optimally suited to a continuous stream that is of constant bandwidth.
It would be ideal if there were a way to leverage the benefits of circuit switches in conjunction with broadcasting/multicasting.